I have just read and will soon review Hermione Lee’s new biography of a major contemporary playwright, Tom Stoppard. Here is a selection of his observations that suggest the thrust and flavor of his thinking.

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o Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

o It’s not the voting that’s democracy; it’s the counting.

o If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.

o Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

o A healthy attitude is contagious but don’t wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.

o I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.

o Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork.

o All your life, you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.

o Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.

o We’re actors. We’re the opposite of people.

o Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.

o Good things, when short, are twice as good.

o I consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life.

o I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.

o The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

o Life is a gamble, at terrible odds – if it was a bet you wouldn’t take it.

o Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.

o Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

o It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it’s a painting, and if you can walk around it it’s a sculpture.

o I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

o The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into a different kind of purpose, which is to divert and distract and entertain.

o For me, human rights simply endorse a view of life and a set of moral values that are perfectly clear to an eight-year-old child. A child knows what is fair and isn’t fair, and justice derives from that knowledge.

o We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.

o I don’t feel that I belong anywhere. Or rather, if there’s a place I belong, I don’t feel I’m there.

o Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it all going to end?

o The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe – responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.

o From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.

o I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.

o I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write one of those 1940s film scripts where every line is written with a sharpness and economy that is frankly artificial.

o I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that – even if it can’t be quantitatively measured as other subjects – it’s as fundamental to all education.

o I don’t keep a diary and I throw away nearly all the paper I might have kept. I don’t keep an archive. There’s something worrying about my make-up that I try to leave no trace of myself apart from my plays.

o When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I’ve left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head.

o You end up going to school plays quite a bit as a parent, there are a lot of kids who are doing the job as well as they can, but there’s always one or two who seem much more at home in the world of impersonation.

o There are certain sorts of jokes which have only to do with the substitution of the unexpected word in a familiar context. If you translated something into French and then had it translated back into English by somebody who didn’t know the original, you’d lose what was funny.

o Honesty is seldom ingratiating and often discomfiting.

o The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it’s no longer the abstract ideal version; it’s an event.

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Tom Stoppard was born on July 3, 1937, and is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter whose work is marked by verbal brilliance, ingenious action, and structural dexterity. His father was working in Singapore in the late 1930s. After the Japanese invasion, his father stayed on and was killed, but Stoppard’s mother and her two sons escaped to India, where in 1946 she married a British officer, Kenneth Stoppard. Soon afterward the family went to live in England. Tom Stoppard — who he had assumed his stepfather’s surname — quit school and started his career as a journalist in Bristol in 1954. He began to write plays in 1960 after moving to London. His first play, A Walk on the Water (1960), was televised in 1963; the stage version, with some additions and the new title Enter a Free Man, reached London in 1968.

To learn more about his life and work, please click here.